Virtualization and Health Care - The Cure-All for Partners?

No soothsaying required: Healthcare IT is the future and it’s growing. That’s why VMware is pushing desktop virtualization as a way healthcare professionals can access their EMR systems and patient records faster. Read on to learn how the company plans to push its virtualization solutions into this expanding vertical:

Healthcare organizations are looking to increase the use of electronic health/medical records (EHR/EMR) and VMware wants to help, especially with the recent round of incentives by the Federal government — which mean healthcare environments have money to spend. Plus, with the growth of a EMR systems and the surge of healthcare professionals using devices and services that access these systems, the need exists to manage and maintain it all.

VMware sees virtualization as the key to that maintenance, and the company is positioning VMware View as the right tool for the job, since the product was designed to integrate with hospitals’ private clouds and data centers. With the technology, centralized virtual desktops can be available on nearly any computer on the hospital network, making physicians’ work mobile and information instantly accessible. Likewise, the central management capabilities of the virtual desktop interface eliminates the need for individually maintaining what could be thousands of computers on a network.

VMware also believes clinicians should have the ability to move freely in a healthcare environment, and virtualization can help bring critical patient information to tablets and other mobile devices. VMware’s ThinApp, which enables those mobile devices, can be utilized as part of VMware’s healthcare solution services.

So what’s the channel angle with all the buzz? Even though VMware’s press release (replete with supporting quotes from hospitals) is high in caloric fluff and low on nutrition, it’s a good indicator of where VARs looking for high-dollar deals should be focusing. What’s more, VMware isn’t the only virtualization game in town, but the release shows that virtualization in hospital environments is useful technology, despite all the EMR intricacies.

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